Acorn Software

Acorn, from Flying Meat Products, is an image editor that keeps things simple while sticking with Photoshop's working practices. The interface is simplicity itself, and consists of an image editing window and a second floating window that contains the tools and the Layers stack. Tools are arranged by class, although putting the Image View controls in the Move section seems a little odd.

Acorn Software
Acorn, from Flying Meat Products, is an image editor that keeps things simple while sticking with Photoshop's working practices.

The interface is simplicity itself, and consists of an image editing window and a second floating window that contains the tools and the Layers stack. Tools are arranged by class, although putting the Image View controls in the Move section seems a little odd.

Acorn supports two types of layers: Bitmap for raster images and Shape Layers for Vector Shape drawing. At the moment this is limited to squares, circles and lines. Text is a special class of Shape layer. One nice feature is the option to select a layer directly by clicking it in the image window. Most of Photoshop's Blending modes are also supported. Selection is by the usual rectangle, oval and freeform marquees, and there's also a Magic Wand tool for making selections based on pixel colour.

The first thing we did was to try to open a large, layered Photoshop file, which Acorn imported with its transparency preserved and all layers named correctly. However, the program doesn't support text layers and refuses to open files that contain Layer masks - presumably because it doesn't support these yet either.

For many people the main reason for owning an image editor is to clean up their digital photos, and you can set Acorn to launch from within iPhoto for this purpose. However, one missing element is the tool many people reach for first: Levels. Only Brightness, Contrast and Saturation are available from the Image menu.

Acorn is a full Cocoa application built on Apple's Core Image Services, and as such it has some very slick features. The Filters list is especially large, with several Classes that have plenty of options in their sub-menus. The Filter interface is also very nicely implemented. Choosing a filter opens the Apply Filters window, where each filter displays its controls. Here you can stack filters on top of each other for cumulative effects, and can even reorder them simply by dragging and dropping. You can even use them to build a pseudo-Levels command by stacking Exposure and Gamma filters (among others) - although the result isn't quite the same. Clicking a filter's name in the stack turns its effect off for a moment. This is very nicely done, although having some way of setting a filter's effect centre interactively would be nice. Of course, as these filters are image units, they are easily expanded with the likes of Noise Industries' freely-downloadable collections.

Another useful feature is the ability to take screenshots. Pressing Command-Shift-6 opens a resizable marquee for framing the shot. Nicer still is the fact that Acorn doesn't have to be the frontmost app (although it does have to be running.). Once captured, the screenshot opens in Acorn for editing.

There are other nice touches, too: Smooth Strokes smooths out pixellated bitmap strokes, pressure sensitivity is supported and you can set Image and Canvas sizes on the fly by holding key combinations with the Zoom tool.

Acorn is well thought out, and most of what it does it does well. However, we think that the implementation of Layer Masks and one-stop Levels editing would make it much more attractive - especially at its excellent price.

Author: Tim Danaher
MacUser Online



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